Christmas

July 14, 2020

I find it amazing that we have over 300 channels on our TV and I still cannot find anything to watch.  I guess this once more lets me know how much I used to watch sports.  That was true again on Saturday night as I slinked back into my office to play my game.  Melissa had said there was not anything on and she was going to work on her succulents.  It turned out she instead turned on a movie that she really enjoyed called Last Christmas, released in 2019.

I looked this up to see why she was so entranced by the movie.  The story is about a young aspiring singer who works as an “elf” in a year-round Christmas store.  Things are falling apart around her, but with every mishap she runs into Tom.  Kate begins to spend more time with Tom and works on improving her life to be more like him.  They break up but Kate goes to his apartment to make amends.  While there she finds out Tom had died in a bicycle accident last Christmas.  She then finds Tom was the organ donor whose heart she received, and that all their interactions were hallucinations. Going to a small garden Kate meets Tom again.  The bench where they sat during their first visit is a memorial bench for Tom.  The movie fades into a summer scene and a happier Kate writing in her journal.  Kate looks up, as Tom always advised.

With theaters closed during most of the pandemic few new movie releases have come out during the last months.  Those that have are limited releases on private platforms like Disney or Netflix.  Another response by stations has been to rerun blockbuster films from years past.  I have noticed several marathon showings.  These are back-to-back showing of all nine Star Wars, or complete runs of all ten Band of Brothers episodes.  One channel has even brought back the Sunday Night at the Movies motif.  Some are as hungry for movies as I am for sports.

THOUGHTS:  One of the appeals for old blockbusters is they take us back to a time and place.  Raiders of the Lost Ark was partially filmed at Petra, an archaeological site I had returned from not a month before I saw the movie.  I saw Jurassic Park at Green Lake during my introduction to denominational polity.  During the pandemic, many people are using movies to go back to an earlier time.  The problem is, the good ol’ days were never that good, at least for some.  Rather than a return to the past, we need to work to make a better future.  Change is coming, and it starts with you.